


Five Things the Nameless One Never Knew About Fall-From-Grace, and One He Learned Later

by yhlee (etothey)



Category: Planescape: Torment
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Music, Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-20
Updated: 2015-11-20
Packaged: 2018-05-02 12:06:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5247680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/pseuds/yhlee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Glimpses of Fall-From-Grace's life.  Includes spoilers for the game.</p><p>Thanks to weakinteraction for the beta.</p><p>As an accompaniment to the fic, I have written you a small piano piece, "A Moment of Grace."  You can find it here:<br/>https://soundcloud.com/yule-tuner/a-moment-of-grace</p><p>(I will make a downloadable version available after reveals.  I apologize for my rusty piano performance skills!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Things the Nameless One Never Knew About Fall-From-Grace, and One He Learned Later

**Author's Note:**

  * For [paperiuni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/gifts).



1\. When Fall-From-Grace was young, but not too young, she had a different name. She never spoke of that name to anyone, and she never taunted the Nameless One with the polysemy of names, the way the people of the planes cast them on, or off, to further schemes or father dreams. That, at least, he guessed, a silent cord of knowledge between them.

What she never spoke of were the games she used to play with her mother, Red Shroud.

Memory is fallible, even to a Sensate; and this was, of course, in the many years before Grace declared that allegiance. Grace knew that the act of remembrance causes memory to alter, so that each remembering becomes its own vintage of the same wine. In some of her memories, her mother was a tall presence with hair and wings the color of drying blood, and eyes half a shade lighter. In some of them, the earrings that swung to every languid movement of her head were set with spinels, and in others, amber in which trapped tiny faces smiled with pinprick desire.

Perhaps this was Red Shroud's method of preparing Grace for the centuries Grace would suffer among the baatezu. Grace would never know. Amid that kaleidoscope wheel of memories, she never forgot her mother saying, over and over, as she tapped a game token with one long nail, "You can't make people trustworthy by trusting them."

Grace thought of those words when her new masters carried her off in chains that burned her slim wrists. Even then she was determined to prove them false.

2\. Grace's last master once took her to see one of the pit fiends. The fiend was crowned in embers and smoke and the haze of decrepit storms. Grace was jewelry in the way of her master's ioun stones (like an armillary sphere, she reflected, orbiting a singularly depraved intellect--and a bold one, hoping to manipulate a pit fiend). She knew her role. And while she schemed for her freedom, slowly and silently, she could not help the way she shone in that black palace like a polestar of forbidden nights.

The meeting concerned the labyrinthine politics of the baatezu. Grace paid close attention. The baatezu were not used to the idea that one of her kind could formulate a plan and nourish it over long centuries.

"Loan her to me for a year and a day," the pit fiend said to Grace's master. "She would shine the brighter here, don't you think?"

"As dark as it is here," Grace said, "there are places darker still." She smiled her mother's smile, because it was the only way to survive.

She was not supposed to speak out of turn. But the pit fiend was amused by her wit and let her go with her master.

True freedom would take more time, but she did not age in the way of mortal women. She could afford to wait.

3\. Shortly after Grace joined the Society of Sensation, she went on a pilgrimage to a statue in Sigil. Allegedly it depicted a tiefling general, the most monstrous of her kind. The sculptor had herself been a Sensate, and Grace was curious: could the stamp of evil be depicted by the stroke of a chisel?

The statue was a masterwork, its base carved with tormented figures, some of races Grace had never conceived of. The tiefling general held a blade of flame tongue. Had it been made of anything but the most austere marble, Grace would have expected it to singe her.

The tiefling general had had an affinity for fire. Around the base of the statue ran letters still crisp: _My name will be written in ash._ The ash of those she had burned in the infamous pyres, once upon a war.

During a later skirmish between the Harmonium and the Xaositects, the statue went missing. Years passed, and years again, and the story of the tiefling general was preserved in the Sensates' own records; that was all. When a younger Sensate came to ask Grace about her impressions, she said, "Is it the statue that you wish you had had a chance to see, or the massacres that the statue memorialized?" And the younger Sensate had no answer for her.

4\. The Brothel for Slaking Intellectual Lusts started in a much smaller building, in the Hive, not the Clerk's Ward. Grace had hoped to bring heartsease to the Hive's denizens. (Her most interesting conversation was with a pack of cranium rats--how many, she didn't want to guess. They paid in secrets. And her time with the baatezu had taught her the value of secrets.) Nevertheless, people came from all over Sigil to see her and her women.

Eventually she moved to the Brothel's final location, because beautiful surroundings would attract even more people, different people--and their stories. But sometimes she missed the Hive, and her view of Sigil's unsky from the old building's barred windows.

5\. Grace's first impression of the Nameless One was not beauty or ugliness--she had matured beyond such things a long time ago--but a palimpsest. This was before she learned of his tattoos, and before she saw more than a few of his scars.

She could have had him, if she had wanted him that way.

She never said so because part of friendship is leaving certain truths unspoken.

* * *

Surrounded by the everywhere horizon of the Blood War, Grace is safer than she has ever been. What does she have to fear from the tanar'ri, when her own mother sold her? Or the baatezu, whom she outplayed? She has come a long way, seeking the Nameless One amid the mass of soldiers.

He is the most dangerous one here.

He is the most dangerous one, and they don't realize it.

Grace intends to help him in any way she can.

There: in the distance. A mace rises. A mace falls. A tall figure unbends from the ruin of lives around him.

Grace walks like a shining knife through the ranks, and they part for her.


End file.
